Tag: Google Play

Erratum is an album that has been in gestation for over a year, and even as I release it into the wild I am refining my ideas about it, and apps, and the place of apps in music-making.

Every track on the album was made using freely available sound mangling apps of my own creation. This intersects with my current philosophies about music and music-making in a few ways.

First, by making all the apps publicly available, I’m basically open-sourcing the album. Okay, the apps aren’t open source (yet), but other musicians can now very easily make very similar music. I think this is a good thing. I hope people find my apps useful. But this is a significant change from my thinking of just a few years ago, which was dominated by a slightly-more-insular academic perspective. The academic perspective says something like “I put in a lot of working making the software, so why should I let just anyone use it, or copy my algorithms.” This is an attitude displayed often by the old-guard type of guys I learned from, and in my previous art albums like Disconnected, I took the same stance. With the continuing dominance of social media over good-old-fashioned-blogs, I’m starting to think that sharing is more important than building up my own ivory tower though, and I tried to do that with this album.

Second, this album is full of short pieces. I’m starting to come around to the idea reflected in Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes, which is that if you’re going to write weird music, it’s better to write many short pieces or movements than to write something monolithic. So each of the pieces on this album are short and unique. The album is held together only by the thread of the mobile apps used to make them.

Finally, this album reflects the increasing pleasure I get from listing to music that is very close to noise. Some listeners might call some of this music noise. One of the apps I used to create this album, Radio Synthesizer simply adds radio-like noise to an audio file in greater or lesser proportions. When I had my first child I remember putting her to sleep with white noise, and for awhile, white noise was 100% effective at putting her to sleep. I think that made me more appreciative of all the different ways that noise can be generated. This album reflects a lot of different ways of getting to and from a noise-like state.